Skin TradeReview

In 2015 if you’re about to sit down in front of a movie starring, written by and produced by Dolph Lundgren there are only two questions: can the big guy still kick ass and are the scenes that fill the gaps between said ass kickery at least marginally tolerable? In the action-revenge thriller Skin Trade, the answer to both questions is, “Yes, but barely.”

Skin Trade marks the fourth feature film written by the Swedish giant. Unlike the other three, he declined to direct this one. There are surely Lundgren completionists out there who can discern the impact several additional screenwriters and a Dolph-free director’s chair had on Skin Trade. Your humble reviewer is sadly not one of them.

Exit Theatre Mode

Comparisons to other Lundgren oeuvre notwithstanding, objectively speaking both the script and Ekachai Uekrongtham’s direction are pretty terrible. The idea is akin to the 2008 Rambo, in which widespread human rights atrocities (in this case, human trafficking, an issue Lundgren has passionately campaigned against) are reduced to a single batch of generic bad guys who can be shot, kicked and body-slammed into submission, except without the benefit of Stallone’s cinematic polish.

The hero of Skin Trade, Nick Cassidy (Lundgren), is your average, all-American supercop. He spends his days arthritically chasing bad guys through the streets of New York. His nights are taken up by reading Shakespeare with his perfect daughter and making tender love to a gorgeous, devoted wife at least 20 years his junior. Surely nothing will come to disturb this domestic tranquility.

Nick takes down a small army of Serbian gangsters, killing the youngest son of Viktor Drago-something (Ron Perlman, affecting yet another non-specific Slavic accent). Viktor, the ruthless head of a worldwide human trafficking network, retaliates but doesn’t finish the job. Nick in turn decides to burn down Viktor’s entire universe.

After the big mob bust (in which, notably, dozens of inept S.W.A.T. officers fail to rack up even half of Nick’s ludicrous body count) we switch to your basic Hard to Kill scenario. Nick gets shot a bunch of times and goes into a coma or something for like half a second. Then Peter Weller shows up with a get well soon card and Nick checks himself out A.M.A. with extreme prejudice. A shot of – What? Adrenaline? – and he instantly turns into The Punisher, his mortal wounds a forgotten inconvenience. He goes on a quick killing spree, then zips off to Mexico en route to Thailand despite having the whole world’s law enforcement community after him for murdering a restaurant full of Russian nationals.

Yep, still a badass.

Getting back to the first of those two key questions: Yes, Dolph’s still got some fighting chops. He’s gotten creaky but at age 57 he can still haul a tree trunk leg up above his waist to deliver a devastating sidekick whenever some clown needs to be shown the inside of a wall. It seems as if he’s still doing most of own stunts, too, whether it’s scooting around on a dirt bike or pitching Tony Jaa through a barn door. There aren’t many stuntmen who can convincingly stand in for the Master of the Universe.

Oh right, Tony Jaa. He’s in this so he and Nick can do a halfhearted Rush Hour/Black Rain buddy cop thing. Of course their relationship starts with a cheap reenactment of Lundgren’s fight with Jet Li from The Expendables but that’s okay. Had to happen. Sure, it’s plagiarized and poorly shot. (Please stop with the random slo-mo. You are not doing it right.) But it’s always fun to see the David and Goliath dynamic, with Jaa flipping all over the place while Lundgren bashes him over the head with club-like fists until they both agree to hug it out and go annihilate some bad guys.

Exit Theatre Mode

Now about that second question. The dramatic bits make sense generally and are therefore not so terrible you feel the urge to smash your head against the TV. That’s about the best you can say about them.

Jaa has to speak English, which is a punishment for both an otherwise talented performer and everyone who has to listen to him. He carries on long, emotional conversations with his human-trafficking-victim-turned-informant girlfriend in a language he can barely understand, which is every bit as painful as it sounds.

Why he couldn’t just speak Thai the whole time is beyond confusing. This thing is set and filmed in Thailand, by a Thai director, using Thai actors (and whatever European ex-pats could be scrounged up from Bangkok pubs on short notice). Maybe they were trying to appeal to American audiences. But surely subtitles would be more palatable than making an action star butcher sweet catchphrases. As Jaa says when he tosses an evil businessman off a balcony, “Neck-coach-ee-Haitian…OVA!”

Exit Theatre Mode

Once Peter Weller escapes the Canadian backlot he must have mistakenly wandered into to land himself in this movie, the prize for best performance is a toss-up between Perlman and Michael Jai White, who is dressed up like Tyler Perry for some reason. For the record, White can still pull off a decent roundhouse kick himself. But when Michael Jai White is among the best actors in your movie, you have troubles. (Unless that movie is Spawn, in which case everything about it is rad and perfect.)

So yeah, whatever. 95 minutes go by as Dolph Lundgren waxes a million henchmen in gratuitous fistfights and machine guns battles. He survives an RPG attack and countless gunshot wounds and spends most of the movie wearing a gross facial prosthesis. Tony Jaa does parkour and outruns a truck. Someone blows up a helicopter. The bad guys die, the movie ends, and Peter Weller still has no idea he was even in it.

The Verdict

Offering literally nothing original, Skin Trade is just a bargain bin action vehicle for an aging star. Still, if you're cool with that, Dolph will be more than happy to beat the crap out of some villains for your amusement.